11 ms·

The rise in ride-sharing requires a rethink in transportation planning within cities and campuses. We did a study for a major university after it found a huge

by marlor 5y ago

The rise in ride-sharing requires a rethink in transportation planning within cities and campuses. We did a study for a major university after it found a huge increase in traffic volumes within its main entry “plaza”, and an associated logjam that radiated from there. A large proportion of that traffic was due to ride-sharing drivers circulating in and around the plaza waiting for passengers. The university built a dedicated ride-sharing area nearby and prohibited ride-sharing services from the plaza. This largely solved the problems (although enforcement is an ongoing issue). Ride-sharing absolutely can cause local increases in congestion if nothing is done to accommodate it. However, it’s a modern reality, so planners who don’t accommodate it aren’t doing their jobs.

wolverine876 5y ago
The obvious solution is to the free-market one: Businesses who want to use a scarce (in the economic sense, i.e., 'limited') public good, road capacity, bid on it. If I understand correctly, that's what taxi medallions are. Many respond with outrage about anything that limits ride-sharing, but they are taking my road space, which my tax dollars pay for.
- heterodoxxed 5y ago
  Is that the only obvious solution? Wouldn't better public transportation (which benefits from economies of scale unlike private automobiles) be equally if not more obvious? Especially since it has a much more proven track record.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Sorry, good point. I meant, given that ride-sharing exists, this is the solution. No idea why you are getting downvoted!
  - hcurtiss 5y ago
    I'm not so sure about that track record. In many major cities public transportation has proven miserable, and that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Viscous circle. Cars are slightly more convenient which gets a few to drive taking people away from transit which then has less money and becomes less useful making cars more convenient. .. It doesn't help that most transit agencies are run by people who drive and so they won't use their limited budget to make something as good as possible.
- dheera 5y ago
  > they are taking my road space And what's the alternative, assuming N people still need to make trips to a particular location? A traffic jam of people driving around in circles searching for half an hour for parking spaces to snatch?
  - CaptainZapp 5y ago
    > And what's the alternative, assuming N people still need to make trips to a particular location? Public transport? Works really well in a lot of cities.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      I was a big public transit user. Since covid, lockdowns and a lack of seasonal flus and cold I'm starting to wonder how healthy it is to cram as many people as possible together in a hot closed environment.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        We have learned a lot. I hope that means transit upgrades to better ventilation which in turn mitigates those issues.
        dheera 5y ago
        That and also, many public-transit-heavy countries in Asia have fared quite well since people believe in science (masks, etc.)
- kortilla 5y ago
  Taxi medallions are bullshit because they have decided in advance that taxi’s only get to use X amount. The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion and charge regardless of vehicle type. The last thing you want to do is charge ride sharers and not single commuters, which are much worse.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > taxi’s only get to use X amount Right; road capacity is a scarce resource. There isn't an unlimited amount available. > The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion Sure, modern tech allows more flexible pricing than periodic capacity auctions. However, I wonder if it allows long-term investment, given that tomorrow your capacity could effectively disappear. > and charge regardless of vehicle type That ends up being regressive taxation. Public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. I absolutely oppose effectively restricting poor people from the roads in parts of the city - and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood? Can they pull out of their parking spot? > bullshit Well if you put it that way ...
    - crowf 5y ago
      I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free, but yet be forced to pay a tax when I use (semi-)public transportation?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit. > I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community. Also, you do use the roads all the time even if you don't drive yourself. Your hair stylist uses them to get to work, your groceries get to the store, your customers come to your store, etc. etc. Imagine your situation if there were no roads. > (semi-)public transportation It's a private, for-profit company.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  Their tax dollars paid for them too. There’s no reason businesses should have to pay to use the road, and everybody else shouldn’t. That’s a targeted market intervention, and couldn’t reasonably be described as a free market solution. A general user pays model would be more free market, but then of course you start to economically disenfranchise the poor. However, constraining productive economic activity as a plan for dealing with inadequate infrastructure development is a fundamentally stupid idea that would impact the prosperity of everybody in the area, whether their business or employment is directly related to transport or not.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Their tax dollars paid for them too. There’s no reason businesses should have to pay to use the road, and everybody else shouldn’t. There's an essential reason: Businesses are not human beings. They don't have rights and we generally don't provide them with public goods. If a person loses everything and is on the street, that's a tragedy and we try to help them; if they are ill, they are guaranteed medical care (depending on some factors); if they die, it's a serious matter involving grief, sometimes crime, etc. If a business loses everything or is ailing or 'dies', it's just part of the creative destruction of capitalism. I can kill your business and be congratulated. People own the roads and the city - they democratically decide what happens with them - and businesses don't. It's not so simplistic, of course, but people need access to roads and we generally believe that freedom involves the ability to move around the public areas as one pleases, regardless of wealth or other factors.
    - AmericanChopper 5y ago
      > but people need access to roads and we generally believe that freedom involves the ability to move around the public areas as one pleases, regardless of wealth or other factors. But not if they’re conducting business?
- adrianN 5y ago
  The natural conclusion to that line of thinking is that all cars bid for using the road. This would certainly help lower traffic, but it would also prevent poor people from using public infrastructure. I think it's very difficult to strike a good balance here.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    It would discourage poor people from wasting high-value roads with their unproductive driving. Nothing wrong with that, just as poor people are discouraged from buying just about everything too frivolously because things cost money. That's the whole point of money - buying things.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      Jesus Christ.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        He's only telling the whole truth even if it is ugly. Limited resources have to be allocated efficiently, otherwise they end up being wasted and everyone suffers in the end. That waste causes needless poverty.
        adrianN 5y ago
        I think the disagreement is about the definition of "efficiently".
        AussieWog93 5y ago
        It was more the utter contempt he had for the poor. The assertion that poor people making use of resources is a "waste" is just wrong however you look at it - factually, socially, morally, economically. Honestly surprised to see someone unapologetically make a statement like this, let alone have someone else back it up as an "uncomfortable truth". I'm not even trying to be PC or "woke" or anything. It was just genuinely that shocking to read.
- neilparikh 5y ago
  One of the big problems with taxi medallions (at least how they're handled now) is that you pay once, and then get access to them forever, which turns them into an asset and the value of the future cash flow is capitalized into the asset value. Allowing people to buy and own a monopoly isn't a great system. If it was set up as an yearly auction, that would work okay.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    While I can see the drawback you describe, isn't that basic capitalism, in regard to any asset? If someone else wants to buy they medallion, they are welcome to make an offer at any time, not just annually.
    - snidane 5y ago
      No, that's basic feudalism. In which you trade privileges for infinite time spans and inherit them across generations. Infini-time auctions are a symptom. Corrupt anti-monopoly office another. Free Market Capitalism actually designs markets for optimal allocation. Can be recognized by operating anti-monopoly yearly or so auctions. When people complain about today's capitalism, they actually complain about feudalism. Yet the aristocratic rentiers they actually hate hide behind the productive capitalists, which leaves people confused. The real parasite successfully conceals its presence.
      - Kbelicius 5y ago
        This sound interesting, do you have any reading to recommend on this subject?
        snidane 5y ago
        Henry George's philosophy extended from land monopoly to general monopoly.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      The land ownership model has already been considered a failure for centuries, the medallion system is just it's younger brother. The medallions should be leased from the government.
- cactus2093 5y ago
  Doesn’t make any sense, the ride share driver and passenger are just as entitled to the roads as you are. Being a car owner really warps the mind in a bizarre way in terms of the entitlement most people seem to feel about their own use of public space and how they justify deserving to use it more than others.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Free market enthusiasts like to move the goalpost wherever they see fit. A true free market solution would be that private operators would build and maintain the infrastructure and then lease the usage. I.e. the roads, parking and other ride share accommodations would be owned by a third party company which the ride share company would pay to be allowed to use. This is obviously a terrible idea, and everybody can see why there is no city that operates roads this way. But it demonstrates that there exists problems which the free market is ill equipped to solve. Road congestion is one of them. A better solution has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread: Congestion taxes + public transportation.
- wonnage 5y ago
  Your tax dollars pay for roads the same way the tip jar at your coffee shop pays for the barista's college tuition... true in a sense, but ultimately meaningless.
- Asooka 5y ago
  Where I am from - Bulgaria, we don't have a limit on taxis AFAIK. They operate on a sort of franchising system - the taxi companies vet drivers and make sure they follow all regulations, in return the driver gets to put the company's logo on their car and gets connected to the company's order system. It's almost exactly like Uber, but with quality control and regulations. Drivers are also not restricted to using only the company's ordering system, there is at least one app that is entirely independent that drivers can opt to use in parallel with their company's system. As long as you use a taxi from a well known established company you can expect a high level of service. On the whole taxis are plentiful and cheap.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid). The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it. And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648
m463 5y ago
This reminds me of all the nearby school parking lots at ~8am and ~3pm every day (well, pre-covid) Even though most of the kids walked, many were not allowed to walk and there were logjams of cars down the block and through the parking lot with plenty of idiocy.
twic 5y ago
"Ride sharing can cause problems unless people who do not benefit from the ride sharing dedicate land and money to alleviating those problems" is a long way of saying "ride sharing causes problems".
- cxr 5y ago
  No one said the quoted bit (your "long way of saying"). Please don't make up quotes (at all), but especially please do not make one up if the only intent is to dump on how bad an idea it would be for someone to actually say it.
  - twic 5y ago
    I said it. The second set of quote marks here do not mark a quotation from someone else, they mark my paraphrase of the first quote.
    - cxr 5y ago
      No worry has been directed at the second set of quotation marks. It's "the first quote"—which is not a quote, because it's something pulled out of thin air—that is the problem. It's also against the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789
jfk13 5y ago
It's something of an aside, and no doubt a losing battle, but I wish we'd stop (ab)using the term "ride-sharing" for services like Uber and Lyft. Ride-sharing is when I'm intending to drive somewhere, have spare capacity in my vehicle, and offer that space (at a price, potentially) to other people. A high degree of ride-sharing would almost certainly decrease congestion by making more efficient use of vehicle capacity. Uber and Lyft are essentially app-enabled taxi services. It's not surprising that putting a huge number of extra taxis on the road can increase congestion as drivers congregate in the areas with most potential fares.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Also, proliferation of taxis[0] doesn't immediately change the behavior of people. It takes time for citizens to adjust to improved transport infrastructure and stop using/storing their own cars in the city. Within that lag window, more taxis = more cars. -- [0] - As you say, Uber and Lyft, and their predecessors and successors, are just that - a different flavor of taxi services. Slightly leaner, at the cost of worse guarantees for certain service types where old-school taxis were bound by regulations, but otherwise pretty much the same thing.
  - lokedhs 5y ago
    The only thing taxis reduce is the need for parking. Everything else results in more traffic compared to individual driving. If I take my own car to work, the car is only on the road between my house and my office. If I take a taxi, at the very least you'll have to add the distance the taxi drove to pick me up, as well as the distance driven to pick the next customer up. There is no way around that, and any argument that taxi services (whether with actual taxis, or by the driver's personal cars) somehow reduce traffic is complete nonsense. That's not even mentioning the fact that a number of people are now going to take a taxi instead of public transport, further increasing the number of cars.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      I don't mean the case of switching from a personal car to a taxi for daily commute. I mean the case of, "I need my car few times a month to run some errands around the city - and since I already have that car, I may as well drive to work instead of using public transport". Availability and reliability of general transport infrastructure - both mass transit and taxis - will drive the decision here. If one can count on always catching fast transportation for those few errands a month, they can retire their car, and that's one less car on the road every day. This does not scale 1:1 with taxis - on a margin, a single extra taxi constantly on the road can tip the decision for several people, removing several cars from the city during rush hours. I'm a not a traffic planner, so I'm not certain if things play out this way in reality - but it sounds plausible. A different topic is that taxis unfortunately compete with mass transit too much these days. For example, in my hometown of Kraków - known in Poland for having a very good public transit system - the situation in recent years[0] evolved to a point in which, for 2+ people traveling further than a bus or tram will go in 20 minutes, it's cheaper[1] to travel in one of these VC-subsidized app-taxis! Given the economics of mass transit, I worry this is not the kind of competition that will lead to improvements of service - instead, it'll lead to further degradation of the bus and tram networks, in a positive feedback loop. -- [0] - I noticed it around 2019, so it's not a COVID-related phenomenon, though the pandemic did a lot of work to cement it, as well as reversing the ongoing efforts to remove car traffic from the city center. [1] - Unless you're a citizen/regular, and pay a monthly pass. I'm currently neither.
908B64B197 5y ago
> The university built a dedicated ride-sharing area nearby and prohibited ride-sharing services from the plaza. This largely solved the problems (although enforcement is an ongoing issue). I hate it when you realize the ride-sharing area is in some offsite parking lot when there's a pick-up area right at the door. Driver should only enter the plaza with a confirmed pick-up (go wait in the designated area), not lazily relocating every ride-share.

by marlor 5y ago

wolverine876 5y ago

The obvious solution is to the free-market one: Businesses who want to use a scarce (in the economic sense, i.e., 'limited') public good, road capacity, bid on it. If I understand correctly, that's what taxi medallions are. Many respond with outrage about anything that limits ride-sharing, but they are taking my road space, which my tax dollars pay for.

heterodoxxed 5y ago
Is that the only obvious solution? Wouldn't better public transportation (which benefits from economies of scale unlike private automobiles) be equally if not more obvious? Especially since it has a much more proven track record.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Sorry, good point. I meant, given that ride-sharing exists, this is the solution. No idea why you are getting downvoted!
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  I'm not so sure about that track record. In many major cities public transportation has proven miserable, and that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Viscous circle. Cars are slightly more convenient which gets a few to drive taking people away from transit which then has less money and becomes less useful making cars more convenient. .. It doesn't help that most transit agencies are run by people who drive and so they won't use their limited budget to make something as good as possible.
dheera 5y ago
> they are taking my road space And what's the alternative, assuming N people still need to make trips to a particular location? A traffic jam of people driving around in circles searching for half an hour for parking spaces to snatch?
- CaptainZapp 5y ago
  > And what's the alternative, assuming N people still need to make trips to a particular location? Public transport? Works really well in a lot of cities.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I was a big public transit user. Since covid, lockdowns and a lack of seasonal flus and cold I'm starting to wonder how healthy it is to cram as many people as possible together in a hot closed environment.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      We have learned a lot. I hope that means transit upgrades to better ventilation which in turn mitigates those issues.
      - dheera 5y ago
        That and also, many public-transit-heavy countries in Asia have fared quite well since people believe in science (masks, etc.)
kortilla 5y ago
Taxi medallions are bullshit because they have decided in advance that taxi’s only get to use X amount. The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion and charge regardless of vehicle type. The last thing you want to do is charge ride sharers and not single commuters, which are much worse.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > taxi’s only get to use X amount Right; road capacity is a scarce resource. There isn't an unlimited amount available. > The actual free market solution would be per mile tolls that increase with congestion Sure, modern tech allows more flexible pricing than periodic capacity auctions. However, I wonder if it allows long-term investment, given that tomorrow your capacity could effectively disappear. > and charge regardless of vehicle type That ends up being regressive taxation. Public resources are public goods; they are for everyone, regardless of ability to pay. I absolutely oppose effectively restricting poor people from the roads in parts of the city - and what happens if there is a lot of traffic in their own neighborhood? Can they pull out of their parking spot? > bullshit Well if you put it that way ...
  - crowf 5y ago
    I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free, but yet be forced to pay a tax when I use (semi-)public transportation?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      First, you aren't forced to pay any tax, the ride-sharing company is. Businesses like to say that taxes are passed on to their customers, but that's not actually true (depending on the elasticity of demand). If Uber could increase revenue by charging more to cover some new tax, they'd already have done it to increase their profit. > I don't have a car. why should I pay for your right to drive on the roads for free That's an issue with every public good, from schools to police to public health to courts to real estate records office, etc. None are utilized anything like equally across the population. Yet we chip in and pay for them because we decide, collectively, that they are important for the community. Also, you do use the roads all the time even if you don't drive yourself. Your hair stylist uses them to get to work, your groceries get to the store, your customers come to your store, etc. etc. Imagine your situation if there were no roads. > (semi-)public transportation It's a private, for-profit company.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
Their tax dollars paid for them too. There’s no reason businesses should have to pay to use the road, and everybody else shouldn’t. That’s a targeted market intervention, and couldn’t reasonably be described as a free market solution. A general user pays model would be more free market, but then of course you start to economically disenfranchise the poor. However, constraining productive economic activity as a plan for dealing with inadequate infrastructure development is a fundamentally stupid idea that would impact the prosperity of everybody in the area, whether their business or employment is directly related to transport or not.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Their tax dollars paid for them too. There’s no reason businesses should have to pay to use the road, and everybody else shouldn’t. There's an essential reason: Businesses are not human beings. They don't have rights and we generally don't provide them with public goods. If a person loses everything and is on the street, that's a tragedy and we try to help them; if they are ill, they are guaranteed medical care (depending on some factors); if they die, it's a serious matter involving grief, sometimes crime, etc. If a business loses everything or is ailing or 'dies', it's just part of the creative destruction of capitalism. I can kill your business and be congratulated. People own the roads and the city - they democratically decide what happens with them - and businesses don't. It's not so simplistic, of course, but people need access to roads and we generally believe that freedom involves the ability to move around the public areas as one pleases, regardless of wealth or other factors.
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    > but people need access to roads and we generally believe that freedom involves the ability to move around the public areas as one pleases, regardless of wealth or other factors. But not if they’re conducting business?
adrianN 5y ago
The natural conclusion to that line of thinking is that all cars bid for using the road. This would certainly help lower traffic, but it would also prevent poor people from using public infrastructure. I think it's very difficult to strike a good balance here.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  It would discourage poor people from wasting high-value roads with their unproductive driving. Nothing wrong with that, just as poor people are discouraged from buying just about everything too frivolously because things cost money. That's the whole point of money - buying things.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Jesus Christ.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      He's only telling the whole truth even if it is ugly. Limited resources have to be allocated efficiently, otherwise they end up being wasted and everyone suffers in the end. That waste causes needless poverty.
      - adrianN 5y ago
        I think the disagreement is about the definition of "efficiently".
        AussieWog93 5y ago
        It was more the utter contempt he had for the poor. The assertion that poor people making use of resources is a "waste" is just wrong however you look at it - factually, socially, morally, economically. Honestly surprised to see someone unapologetically make a statement like this, let alone have someone else back it up as an "uncomfortable truth". I'm not even trying to be PC or "woke" or anything. It was just genuinely that shocking to read.
neilparikh 5y ago
One of the big problems with taxi medallions (at least how they're handled now) is that you pay once, and then get access to them forever, which turns them into an asset and the value of the future cash flow is capitalized into the asset value. Allowing people to buy and own a monopoly isn't a great system. If it was set up as an yearly auction, that would work okay.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  While I can see the drawback you describe, isn't that basic capitalism, in regard to any asset? If someone else wants to buy they medallion, they are welcome to make an offer at any time, not just annually.
  - snidane 5y ago
    No, that's basic feudalism. In which you trade privileges for infinite time spans and inherit them across generations. Infini-time auctions are a symptom. Corrupt anti-monopoly office another. Free Market Capitalism actually designs markets for optimal allocation. Can be recognized by operating anti-monopoly yearly or so auctions. When people complain about today's capitalism, they actually complain about feudalism. Yet the aristocratic rentiers they actually hate hide behind the productive capitalists, which leaves people confused. The real parasite successfully conceals its presence.
    - Kbelicius 5y ago
      This sound interesting, do you have any reading to recommend on this subject?
      - snidane 5y ago
        Henry George's philosophy extended from land monopoly to general monopoly.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    The land ownership model has already been considered a failure for centuries, the medallion system is just it's younger brother. The medallions should be leased from the government.
cactus2093 5y ago
Doesn’t make any sense, the ride share driver and passenger are just as entitled to the roads as you are. Being a car owner really warps the mind in a bizarre way in terms of the entitlement most people seem to feel about their own use of public space and how they justify deserving to use it more than others.
runarberg 5y ago
Free market enthusiasts like to move the goalpost wherever they see fit. A true free market solution would be that private operators would build and maintain the infrastructure and then lease the usage. I.e. the roads, parking and other ride share accommodations would be owned by a third party company which the ride share company would pay to be allowed to use. This is obviously a terrible idea, and everybody can see why there is no city that operates roads this way. But it demonstrates that there exists problems which the free market is ill equipped to solve. Road congestion is one of them. A better solution has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread: Congestion taxes + public transportation.
wonnage 5y ago
Your tax dollars pay for roads the same way the tip jar at your coffee shop pays for the barista's college tuition... true in a sense, but ultimately meaningless.
Asooka 5y ago
Where I am from - Bulgaria, we don't have a limit on taxis AFAIK. They operate on a sort of franchising system - the taxi companies vet drivers and make sure they follow all regulations, in return the driver gets to put the company's logo on their car and gets connected to the company's order system. It's almost exactly like Uber, but with quality control and regulations. Drivers are also not restricted to using only the company's ordering system, there is at least one app that is entirely independent that drivers can opt to use in parallel with their company's system. As long as you use a taxi from a well known established company you can expect a high level of service. On the whole taxis are plentiful and cheap.
908B64B197 5y ago
Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid). The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it. And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648

m463 5y ago

This reminds me of all the nearby school parking lots at ~8am and ~3pm every day (well, pre-covid) Even though most of the kids walked, many were not allowed to walk and there were logjams of cars down the block and through the parking lot with plenty of idiocy.

twic 5y ago

"Ride sharing can cause problems unless people who do not benefit from the ride sharing dedicate land and money to alleviating those problems" is a long way of saying "ride sharing causes problems".

cxr 5y ago
No one said the quoted bit (your "long way of saying"). Please don't make up quotes (at all), but especially please do not make one up if the only intent is to dump on how bad an idea it would be for someone to actually say it.
- twic 5y ago
  I said it. The second set of quote marks here do not mark a quotation from someone else, they mark my paraphrase of the first quote.
  - cxr 5y ago
    No worry has been directed at the second set of quotation marks. It's "the first quote"—which is not a quote, because it's something pulled out of thin air—that is the problem. It's also against the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15893789

jfk13 5y ago

It's something of an aside, and no doubt a losing battle, but I wish we'd stop (ab)using the term "ride-sharing" for services like Uber and Lyft. Ride-sharing is when I'm intending to drive somewhere, have spare capacity in my vehicle, and offer that space (at a price, potentially) to other people. A high degree of ride-sharing would almost certainly decrease congestion by making more efficient use of vehicle capacity. Uber and Lyft are essentially app-enabled taxi services. It's not surprising that putting a huge number of extra taxis on the road can increase congestion as drivers congregate in the areas with most potential fares.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Also, proliferation of taxis[0] doesn't immediately change the behavior of people. It takes time for citizens to adjust to improved transport infrastructure and stop using/storing their own cars in the city. Within that lag window, more taxis = more cars. -- [0] - As you say, Uber and Lyft, and their predecessors and successors, are just that - a different flavor of taxi services. Slightly leaner, at the cost of worse guarantees for certain service types where old-school taxis were bound by regulations, but otherwise pretty much the same thing.
- lokedhs 5y ago
  The only thing taxis reduce is the need for parking. Everything else results in more traffic compared to individual driving. If I take my own car to work, the car is only on the road between my house and my office. If I take a taxi, at the very least you'll have to add the distance the taxi drove to pick me up, as well as the distance driven to pick the next customer up. There is no way around that, and any argument that taxi services (whether with actual taxis, or by the driver's personal cars) somehow reduce traffic is complete nonsense. That's not even mentioning the fact that a number of people are now going to take a taxi instead of public transport, further increasing the number of cars.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I don't mean the case of switching from a personal car to a taxi for daily commute. I mean the case of, "I need my car few times a month to run some errands around the city - and since I already have that car, I may as well drive to work instead of using public transport". Availability and reliability of general transport infrastructure - both mass transit and taxis - will drive the decision here. If one can count on always catching fast transportation for those few errands a month, they can retire their car, and that's one less car on the road every day. This does not scale 1:1 with taxis - on a margin, a single extra taxi constantly on the road can tip the decision for several people, removing several cars from the city during rush hours. I'm a not a traffic planner, so I'm not certain if things play out this way in reality - but it sounds plausible. A different topic is that taxis unfortunately compete with mass transit too much these days. For example, in my hometown of Kraków - known in Poland for having a very good public transit system - the situation in recent years[0] evolved to a point in which, for 2+ people traveling further than a bus or tram will go in 20 minutes, it's cheaper[1] to travel in one of these VC-subsidized app-taxis! Given the economics of mass transit, I worry this is not the kind of competition that will lead to improvements of service - instead, it'll lead to further degradation of the bus and tram networks, in a positive feedback loop. -- [0] - I noticed it around 2019, so it's not a COVID-related phenomenon, though the pandemic did a lot of work to cement it, as well as reversing the ongoing efforts to remove car traffic from the city center. [1] - Unless you're a citizen/regular, and pay a monthly pass. I'm currently neither.

908B64B197 5y ago

> The university built a dedicated ride-sharing area nearby and prohibited ride-sharing services from the plaza. This largely solved the problems (although enforcement is an ongoing issue). I hate it when you realize the ride-sharing area is in some offsite parking lot when there's a pick-up area right at the door. Driver should only enter the plaza with a confirmed pick-up (go wait in the designated area), not lazily relocating every ride-share.